Draft Day's Super Bowl Spot Arrives Early

The one thing you’re agreeing to by making a film like Draft Day is that you’re gonna have to shell out the $4.5 million for thirty seconds (in this case, a little more) to plug the film on the biggest football day of the year. The Ivan Reitman-directed film follows the stressful day of the NFL Draft with Cleveland Browns GM Sonny Weaver (Kevin Costner) deciding what to do with the number one overall pick, a decision that could shape the history of the franchise forever.

Above, you can catch the Super Bowl footage to be shown during the game, which plays specifically to football fans in basically establishing that this is how the sausage is made. While yesterday’s sports movies were made about heroic athletes, the 24/7 media cycle has established that, on a whole, most people who professionally throw about a ball are quite dull and uninteresting. Which is why Draft Day takes us behind the scenes where Weaver wheels and deals, with Costner supplying his Heartland-fueled charm to sell us on the believability of an everyman in this stressful situation. It actually kind of comes across as an NFL ad, which will leave some football fans wondering, "Wait, is this a movie?" But that’s sort of what you’d expect from a Super Bowl ad about a football movie.

There are also four new clips from the film from Coming Soon to further whet your appetite for strict workplace shenanigans. The first finds Weaver talking to his team’s owner, played by Frank Langella, who already has his mind set on drafting prospect Bo Callahan with that first pick, even though Weaver remains undecided. The Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark joke already feels a little dated.
The second clip finds Weaver discussing with Jennifer Garner’s character whether he should draft Callahan, with these clips basically hinting that Weaver will not make that call. It’s not certain that a football general manager needs to be informed that Ryan Leaf was selected second back in 1998, or that Tom Brady was basically a draft afterthought. Reitman clearly thinks a lot of non-football people just won’t get this movie.
The third clip shows off Denis Leary as the Browns’ new coach, apparently coming off a Super Bowl with the Dallas Cowboys. The hook of this scene is the dialogue back-and-forth between Costner and Leary, and to be honest it seems like this is screwball material played very slow and laborious. Kind of runs counter to those Black List kudos the screenplay earned a short while back.
The fourth clip finds Weaver making the unlikely gesture of reaching out to another college player regarding Callahan, in this case played by 42 star Chadwick Boseman. Boseman, in a pretty fly haircut, seems much more charismatic and loose than he did in that Jackie Robinson biopic, which papers over the fact that Boseman is 32 years old and playing a college athlete.